Even on the most blustery day, the mountains are steady
Learn the lessons of the wind and earth
Walk between the two
Let your breath ramble across the sky
Let your body feel the slow pulse of the land, the cool solidity of stone
Learn to be weightless and grounded
To be pulled and anchored
Learn to live between the two
to be achingly alive and free
“Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still / it explains nothing.”
—Mary Oliver, “Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way” from Felicity
These lines caught me immediately. I’ve been rolling them around on my tongue for days, though part of me wants to erase the second half and still, it explains nothing. Until this morning, I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, I wanted these words gone, except I didn’t understand what she meant; I wanted to say back, yes, beauty can explain everything.
And then this morning, I read this from Thich Nhat Hanh’s How to Sit :
“If you ask a child, ‘Why are you eating chocolate?’ The child would likely answer, ‘Because I like it.’ There’s no purpose in eating the chocolate. Suppose you climb a hill and stand on top to look around. You might feel quite happy standing on the hill. There’s not a reason for doing it. Sit in order to sit. Stand in order to stand. There is no goal or aim in sitting. Do it because it makes you happy.”
There is no purpose. There is no goal or aim. Do it because it makes you happy. And yet, beneath this is the understanding that the meaning is in the mindfulness. That beauty or action alone explains nothing. That they are not, in fact, trying to explain anything anyway.
Amidst the industry and utility of this world, I easily forget the simplicity of being.
I forget that we aren’t meant to explain so much as to experience.
Beauty has its way of catching us and bringing us into presence. Beauty has its way of bringing us beyond the explanation and into the heart of experience. And so beauty has no duty to explain. And neither do I, except to tell you what I’ve learned:
Beneath beauty is breath.
You don’t have to explain anything. Just breathe. Do it because it makes you happy.
4/6/2016
6:12 am — A periwinkle sky, soft and bright and so translucent it seems to levitate above the mountains. Which of course it always does, but only now do I see just how the horizon is born from light.
6:22 am — The sky drifts into pastels, pink and peach. Waylon sleeps curled next to me as I read, and I think I am happy, content, peaceful, except none of these words are right. It’s something quieter, deeper, something nameless that fills me.
It eases the urgency of doing.
6:32 am — The light has cascaded from the sky onto the mountains themselves.
The mountains are like a farm woman: strong, steady, curves around the muscles. Sometimes they’re merely noticed, but eventually truly seen, causing the observer to stop and breathe in the beauty, the wildness, the stateliness, the pure bedrock of life at once tangled and ordered; a being large enough to hold contradictions and surprises and still offer comfort in the sheer mass of her embrace.
When I hold my son, I imagine the mass of the mountains in my hug.
When I hold my son, I feel his energy and I realize how much slower I’ve become. How motherhood necessitates that. How the wind, which once directed me, now flows through him. How I’ve come into conversation with the roots of trees. How I’ve learned to match the pace of mountains.
He is the wildness. I am the wild.
When I hold my son, I realize I have become a home.
6:38 — He sleeps. I write. The light pours down the mountainside.
In another few hours it will reach the west-facing hillside and be upon us all.
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
I am searching for wildness,
proving it lives
among us
despite us.
Why do I walk slowly
in the woods, why
do I stop at the rhythmic beating
of a woodpecker, why
do I pause to take in the shape
of a leaf, or a paw print, or the
curve and drop of a stream?
Terry Tempest Williams wrote:
the degree of our awareness
is the degree of our aliveness.
I want to be alive.
If I am to live,
if my cells are to awaken
and if my breath is to expand
into my lungs
it will be because wildness
pulled me out of sleep,
splashed me with cold water,
and poured wind through
my hair, into my mouth,
deep into my body.
If I am to live
it will be because this world
also lives
tangled and pure, wildness running
through the veins.
I used to care
about proper grammar–
well vs. good
I vs. me–
but now, what does it matter?
I know what you mean.
There are already
so many rules
what shackles need to be
on expression?
None!
Sometimes, when I hear
birdsong in the morning
it strikes me that I don’t know
what they are saying,
but I feel their happiness.
That’s all we’re really after,
isn’t it?
To share with each other
our heart’s fire
be it sadness, or anger,
or expounding joy.
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
Twenty-one months–
that’s all it took
to bring us to this moment.
And just as it delivered us here,
impermanence will take us away
to tomorrow.
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leavea link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
I can tell you I am a mother,
a farmer, a writer
but these definitions do not tell you
the quality of my breath
or depth of my laugh
or the hard pulse of my longings.
I’ve met challenges
in every phase, and for so long
I equated what I’m doing with
what my life is.
But the truth is
life is movement, energy–
rain falling to the earth
fire burning in the stove
bodies warming each other
beneath the blankets.
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
Last night spring peepers
sang, the pluck-pluck of their notes
rising into night
finally bridging
late winter to spring, each note
rejoicing in mud
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
Hand, rock and moss, you
Show me again: each part of
This world is alive
